Stonefold teaches you to survive alone.
But revolutions? They're stitched together—thread by quiet thread.
---
Lira and I move without fanfare. No speeches. No banners. Just eyes, ears, and small truths dropped in careful hands.
The next name is Narth—a forger with a crooked nose and ink-stained fingertips. They say he used to counterfeit royal ledgers before the Threadless found him. Now he makes documents vanish like smoke.
We catch him after dark, hunched over a table deep in the bones of the archive tunnel. I show him a page from a destroyed contract—the one I stole in Chapter 6. One I shouldn't still have.
He stares at the ink. At me.
"You want me to make this *reappear,* don't you?"
"No," I say. "I want you to remember *why* you used to make things vanish."
He studies me. Then Lira.
Then, the ring.
"…How long until you make your move?"
"When we know the ground beneath us won't collapse."
Narth doesn't nod. But he doesn't turn us away either.
We leave with silence in our wake—but the kind that *listens.*
---
The next is harder.
Branvel. Muscle for hire. Loyal to coin, but not to cruelty. He guards the quarter tunnels, escorting smugglers and silencing spies.
He almost guts me before Lira steps between us.
But once we show him who Vannor's gold truly funds—once we tell him the name of the child whose family vanished after they couldn't pay a fabricated debt—he lowers the knife.
"Why me?" he growls.
"Because you remember what it's like to have no one speak for you," I say.
He looks at me for a long time.
Then nods.
Once.
---
One by one, the threads start to tug free from the web.
A lookout who blinks a message across rooftops.
A scribe who leaves records incomplete.
A tailor who sews secret signals into collars.
We're not soldiers.
Not yet.
We're just *ready.*
And readiness is a weapon the Threadless have never feared—because they've never seen it from *below.*
---
Lira leans beside me on the cold edge of a rooftop, dusk pressing close.
"You're building something," she says.
I shake my head.
"We're *rebuilding* something."
She doesn't answer. But the silence between us is solid now. Trust wrapped in thread and fire.
---
The ring pulses once, softly.
And I know.
Soon—*very* soon—
We won't be the ones moving in secret anymore.
We'll be the ones the dark starts whispering *about.*